Sunday Sessions 2009/Problems Audio Players Face Today
This session, led by Lydia from Amarok2, covered various common features or problems music players face today and which could benefit from communautary solutions.
Contents |
[edit] Attendees
- Lydia / Amarok2 (Community Manager)
- Ulrich / SIP Communicator
- Sven / ScummVM
- Leo / KDE-Amarok2
- Florian / XMMS2
- Vincent / CrystalSpace 3D
- Michael / Audacity
- Rafael / Maemo
- Scott / Haiku
- Joel / OpenCog
- Sébastien / XMMS2
- Lance / OSUOSL
- Austin / Rockbox
- Peter / Rockbox
- & others
[edit] Problems
[edit] Lyrics
Problem: Lyrics websites are taken down regularly or filled with ads, which makes it difficult to fetch lyrics from a music player, especially without requiring frequent updates of the lyrics fetching scripts.
Proposed solution: Use a pool of services, i.e.
- Manage a central service with pointer to sites and ways to parse them (think cleanroom approach, don't store the data to avoid legal issues).
- Update that central service instead of the the local scripts.
- Possibly exploit machine Learning to optimize fetching of lyrics.
[edit] Wikipedia infos
Problem:
- Broken when change theme
- Find artist page/id?
Proposed solutions:
- Improve scripts
- Use Freebase or MusicBrainz to link entities to Wikipedia pages
[edit] Cover Art
Problem:
- Can't fetch from Amazon anymore (license, must delete after N days, broken querying, need auth now)
- Can use Last.Fm, but imperfect
Proposed solution: Use Last.Fm, try to see if it's relevant to MusicBrainz and worth getting in touch with them
[edit] Features
[edit] Portable Audio Device support
Supported wanted for:
- iPods (compatibility regularly broken)
- MTP
- USB mass-storage
- Rockbox database
Current state:
- XMMS2 (server) doesn't support any device at this point, hopes for support in clients or service clients
- Amarok2 uses libgpod (for iPods), no real native support for others
- Rockbox could benefit from syncing with a desktop music player for:
- Tracks
- Playlists
- Database (aka tagcache), faster to transfer or generate on a computer than on the device
- Ratings
- Cover art
- Rockbox used to have a script to refresh the tagcache on the desktop, talks about integrating tool in rbutils. The tagcache is documented.
- Android players could also benefit from syncing; need to look into existence of APIs for this, maybe android-flavour-specific.
Extra: People interested in find a good device with good support should consult the Rockbox Buyers' Guide
[edit] Tagging system, user tags/"labels", similar artists (Joel)
Note: by tag, think del.icio.us tags, social or personnal tagging, not file metadata (hence the "label" terminology in Amarok2 world).
- Different from "genres"
- Could be imported from Last.Fm (from the user account, or social tags)
- Useful to organise one's music or see how other people classify music
- Amarok2 has labels, not a very good interface. Potential link to Nepomuk.
- XMMS2 lets the user tag songs (in various ways), but clients don't expose any fancy interface yet.
- Need better integration for viewing, editing, browsing!
[edit]
- Amarok2 can be run in server mode (?)
- XMMS2 allows remote access, possibly distributed libraries with DAAP
[edit] MusicBrainz support (theefer)
- Amarok has problems with the C library, API
- XMMS2 reads the MusicBrainz tags if present, but doesn't really use them. Ideas for on-the-fly id retrieval.
- Most players expect users to apply Picard on files manually
- Tags can and should be submitted to Last.Fm (unclear what they do with them)
- No good mass tagging UI in Amarok2 yet, use easytag instead
[edit] MPRIS
What is the state of MPRIS and MPRIS support?
- Supported by Amarok2
- Not supported by XMMS2 (though they host the spec, time to get to work!)
- Good protocol for simple controls, widgets, icon tray applets
- There is a Plasma widget that talks MPRIS
- Lowest Common Denominator, so not very practical for building advanced players
